I've been covering the video game space for 20 years for outlets like The Washington Post, Reuters, CNET, AOL, Wired Magazine, Yahoo!, Entertainment Weekly, NBC, Variety, Maxim, EGM, and ESPN. I serve as EIC of GamerHub.tv and co-founder of GamerHub Content Network, a video game and technology video syndication network that works with Tribune and DBG to syndicate game videos and editorial around the world. I also cover games for outlets like The Hollywood Reporter, IGN, Geek Monthly, CNN, DigitalTrends and PrimaGames.

Approximately 5,000 fans of eSports have traveled to Las Vegas to watch four days of live pro gaming events at The Cosmpolitan Hotel and Casino. IGN Pro League 5 (IPL 5) marks the start-up league’s first foray into fighting games, having signed exclusive eSports deals with Capcom for Super Street Fighter IV Arcade Edition and Street Fighter X Tekken and Tecmo Koei for Dead or Alive 5. David Ting, general manager of eSports for IGN Entertainment and founder of the IPL, talks about the growth potential for eSports in 2013 and explains why Call of Duty: Black Ops II may not be in the competitive picture in this exclusive interview.

What impact do you hope the new fighting games that you’ve signed for IPL has on eSports in 2013 and beyond?

If you look at the spectrum of all the different eSports, some are easy to understand, but there are also some games on the other end of the spectrum with a lot of strategy involved, where if you don’t play the game, you don’t understand what’s going on. Street Fighter is great for casual fans because almost everyone knows that game. It will bring in a lot of mainstream audiences. We’re producing it like a boxing event. We want to bring in the MMA world with this digital fighting tournament. We hope to see similar levels of interest with these fighting games as the MMA has seen with mainstream viewers.

How do you envision these fighting tournaments?

The beauty of fighting games is that they’re short. It’s easy to do a 72-player tournament. We can do multiple games on the stage and we’ll probably mix it up a bit with different fighters. We’ll experiment and tweak it as we always do with IPL – I expect we’ll use a blend of titles and have a great viewing experience using both the primary and secondary screens with multiple streams to make sure people won’t miss a game. We’ll show the more interesting parts on stage and other activity will get moved to the secondary screen.

Would you also be blending the Capcom and Tecmo Koei fighting games?

Yes. DOA 5 and Street Fighter 4 can be on the same stage with 64 or 72 players each. And those tournaments can be completed within the same timeframe as StarCraft II.

What do you feel you can do with fighting games that we haven’t seen in eSports?

In the near future maybe we’ll do these matches in a boxing ring in a stadium on a big screen,. We’ll have entrances with guys going in with controllers in their hands and have ring girls between matches. This is all a hypothetical scenario of how it can be produced, but we’ll definitely experiment with new ways to help to grow the audience with these fighting games. There’s so much potential with eSports.

Since IPL has found a home in Vegas, it seems like a natural fit for the boxing and MMA audience with so many fights held here.

Vegas ties in well with this. There’s a great boxing ring at Mandalay Bay that we could set up and produce a fighter event and have the full experience that way. The beauty of eSports is that it’s in such early stages that we can experiment a lot. There are so many things we can do with it, where the production value can marry traditional sports with eSports to attract a wider audience.

How have you seen IPL grow since you launched?

We’ve been lucky thus far. We started 18 months ago with a set of volunteers. I’m from tech the world. At Intel, Andy Grove had Moore’s Law and he said only the paranoid survive to help drive innovation at that company. We have a similar philosophy here, where we have experienced Moore’s Laws with views and time spent on our content. With every major IPL event we want to see our traffic double. And that’s happened so far. With IPL 5, we’re shooting for doubling the numbers from IPL 4 – and we’re tracking to do that. IPL 4 had 6 million hours of content watched, 3 million unique video views, 346,000 concurrent viewers, 35 million video views. We hope to double that this weekend.

What are your thoughts on the role League of Legends has played in the growth of eSports?

We have a great partnership with Riot, which began last October with IPL 3 in Atlantic City. There’s been tremendous growth with League of Legends. It’s a casual game with lots of fans who play the game and they come out to watch the game. We’re seeing a surge in traffic here at IPL 5 with League of Legends fans. . .there are 2 to 3 times more League of Legends fans than StarCraft II fans here in Vegas.

Can you give us some concrete numbers for those fans?

Last October our first event sold 100 tickets for League of Legends. At IPL 5 we have over 2,000 people who bought tickets for League of Legends. That’s 60% of our attendance – which is approximately 5,000 people. StarCraft II accounts for about 35% of our audience. The remaining 5% are here for Shootmania. They’re mostly people competing for the $100,000.

What are your thoughts on Shootmania’s eSports potential?

It’s still early. It’s still the beta version of game. But I’m optimistic that it’s going to grow as more people play it. What is hurting it now is that there’s not enough of a player base that makes it a watchable eSports event.

What impact do you see StarCraft II: Heart of the Swarm’s new broadcast features having on IPL next year?

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